Legal Design bridges domains of academic research and professional practice. It links the business world and the academic world, the management world and the legal world, and the corrective/reactive law world and the proactive/preventive law world. It takes a big-tent approach: to welcome many different kinds of people from practice, academia, government, and the community, and to work closely with many other research groups — acknowledging the value of their work and mindsets. All are welcome to develop a strong practical and theoretical foundation for how law works currently, and how it can work better in the future.

For us, “Legal” does not only refer to the legislative system, but it includes also doctrine, jurisprudence, decisions, social norms, contractual provisions, policies. We move beyond the static positive law approach, as many other researchers have established. We take a proactive and preventive law stance, meaning that our focus is about empirical reality — not just the law. We work alongside researchers in empirical legal studies, legal realism, law and society, law in action, participatory action research, and others who are working on understanding the reality of law, and who are studying new interventions to improve this reality.

For us, “Design” is an approach of creating new interventions to make a social system more usable, useful, and accessible. Design is not content to understand the current reality, but it aims to experiment with what could be — and to drive towards social impact by creating new programs and policies. Design creates knowledge by building new things — documents, services, technologies, rules, and systems, piloting them, and evaluating them. Design also takes a wider perspective on what “law” is, by bringing more stakeholders’ perspectives into account, and by looking at an interdisciplinary set of tools and expertise to find promising solutions. With this design focus, we work alongside researchers in human-computer interaction, document and information design, the semantic web, research through design, ICT for development, and privacy and ethics in ICT.

Legal Design research methodologies range from the small and qualitative, to larger scale quantitative ones. These methodologies aim to better understand the current  realities of the law and its users, with focus groups, surveys, service safaris, design workshops, and statistical analysis. They also aim to generate and vet promising ideas for new interventions, with design jams, hackathons, field tests, lab tests, and pre-pilots and pilot observational studies. Finally, Legal Design researchers evaluate the outcomes of these new interventions, with randomized controlled trials and evaluations of procedural justice, usability, and user experience. These research methodologies are not exclusive, and this website will document these various methods in detail and provide examples with specific studies, datasets, and instruments.

Legal Design can contribute to better empirical realities, especially if we involve the builders, makers, and users of the legal system into making them. To paraphrase Dean Edward A. Dauer, litigation law is mostly law. Preventive law is mostly facts. And the critical time for Legal Design is when those facts are first being born. Please let us be involved in the making of those facts.